Lexical accuracy

The failure of American political speech

OUTRIGHT abuse of the word "socialism" is one of the few things about America that really peeves me. (By "really" I mean a visceral, principled peeve, not the grumpy, petty kind of peeve about how hard it is to get a decent cup of tea.) As our Book of isms says, socialism is

A political and economic theory that holds that the means of production and distribution in an economy should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole or by a central government.

Got that? The means of production. Owned* by the government. As in the "Union of Soviet Socialist Republics". Not Communist Republics, because they never actually attained their idyllic goal of common ownership of all property. Socialism is not "the government should provide healthcare" or "the rich should be taxed more" nor any of the other watery social-democratic positions that the American right likes to demonise by calling them "socialist"—and granted, it is chiefly the right that does so, but the fact that rightists are so rarely confronted and ridiculed for it means that they have successfully muddied the political discourse to the point where an awful lot of Americans have only the flimsiest grasp of what socialism is. And that, in a country that sent tens of thousands of men to die fighting socialism, is frankly an insult to those dead soldiers' memories.

With that off my chest, it's therefore interesting to read our fellow blogger Will Wilkinson's post on another blog on his problems with the word "libertarian", a label frequently applied to him. Given his views on taxation, the state, redistributive policies and so on, he can only, he says, be called a liberal, or maybe a "liberaltarian". Once again, as he points out, both "liberal" and "libertarian" are frequently misunderstood in much the same way that "socialist" is.

Similar confusion, writes Mark Lilla in the current New York Review of Books, has befallen the word"conservative". Tracing the genesis of the term in its modern sense to Edmund Burke in the aftermath of the French Revolution, he writes that conservatives, of whom Burke was one,

have always seen society as a kind of inheritance we receive and are responsible for; we have obligations toward those who came before and to those who will come after, and these obligations take priority over our rights... Classical liberals like John Stuart Mill, in contrast to conservatives, give individuals priority over society, on anthropological as well as moral grounds. They assume that societies are genuinely constructs of human freedom, that whatever we inherit from them, they can always be unmade or remade through free human action.

By these lights, as Mr Lilla points out, Americans are liberal at heart:

We take it for granted that we are born free, that we constitute society, it doesn't constitute us, and that together we legitimately govern ourselves. Most intellectuals who call themselves conservatives today accept as self-evident the truths enumerated in the Declaration of Independence, which no traditional European conservative could.

And yet "liberal" is almost a pejorative in America, tainted as it is with associations to that demon-word, "socialist". When people here own up to being liberals, they have to do it with a certain defiance.

I don't think this is a matter simply of linguistic drift or the mutation that political terms undergo when they cross the Atlantic. "Words are failing us," Mr Lilla writes, and I agree. The cause seems, at least to me, fairly obvious. People tend to use these labels more about their opponents than they do about themselves. The purpose of the label is not to describe someone but to classify him, to put him in the "enemy" box, and that makes playing fast and loose with the meaning of the word practically unavoidable.

Why this feels more pronounced in America than elsewhere, I'm not sure; it's tempting to blame the increasingly tribal nature of American politics, but I don't have enough time in this country to judge how true that is. Within this framework, though, it bears noting that "libertarian" has not acquired quite the pejorative tinge that some other terms have, no doubt because people with libertarian tendences frequently find themselves on both sides of the political fence.

*Update: or controlled/managed; "regulated" in this context obviously doesn't mean simply "being subject to government regulation", as a couple of commenters have read it, because every government, no matter how free-market, regulates the economy to some extent.

Many of today's European socialist parties were founded, one hundred years or more ago, as revolutionary working-class parties — the real thing, Marxist associations intended on throwing the bourgeoisie overboard and abolishing private property.

Most of them abandoned their revolutionary roots at one time or another in the 20th century and became de facto social-democrat parties, whose main political goal was not anymore to abolish capitalism.

Instead, they were happy to ensure that the wealth created by capitalist economies would be more evenly distributed, be it directly through better wages to the working-class, or indirectly through taxation and the provision of public services - health, education, etc... — by the state.

But their names remained — they had become valuable brands in the political market, to use a very capitalistic image. So we have this collection of social-democrats in socialists' skins.

I think Johnson has a good point, although things are not as black-and-white as he has portrayed for polemic. There is in fact a broad continuous range of left-wing political identities, from the most moderate social-democrat to firebrand socialists.

But he is right when he says that political speech in the US muddled any meaning these words could have. Blame it first on McCarthysm, that turned anything remotely related to the left into political poison, and then on ultrapartisanship and a desire to attach a stigma to ideological opponents.

Either way, as I have pointed many times in TE's forums, the US has become a strange political animal: one without a left side, only the center and the right. And poor Obama, who would be an exceedingly moderate social-democrat anywhere in the world, is seriously accused of being a radical socialist by lunatic right-wingers who see themselves as the political center.

okay the socialist party in France is called that because its the same party as 40 years ago and their not going to change the name.
It drives the entire rest of the world mad to hear Obama called a socialist. Call him whatever you want; ineffective,anti-business, incompetent, jumped up community organiser, as good as coalition builder as John quincy adams, an alien reptilian overlord but for the love of christ stop calling him a socialist.

"Obamacare" is too the right of both nixons and eishenhowers proposals and the most effective healthcare system in the world is singapore which is heavily regulated.

you can hate the man an everything he stands for but stop butchering the english language.

A political and economic theory that holds that the means of production and distribution in an economy should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole or by a central government.

Got that? The means of production. Owned by the government."

No, that's not what it said. "Owned *or regulated*". Got that?

So if the means of production and distribution are in private hands, but they have to abide by an overwhelming blizzard of regulations that nearly buries their ability to function the way a business in a free economy should function (namely, in response to the market), then by this definition it is completely fair to describe that situation as socialism.

The reason the term 'liberal' has become pejorative and that liberals are now adopting the term 'progressive' is because of the general perception that liberal policies are failed policies. The reason the term 'conservative' is used as a pejorative by liberals, but has not gone out of fashion is because of the perception that conservative policies are not failed.

I do not believe that it is improper to apply socialist and capitalist to certain policies if they are on the side of the spectrum that ends in pure socialism or capitalism b/c policies are more or less so. In the U.S. many such policies are purposely intended to lead to such a result. For example, many believe that Obamacare is a necessary step on the path to government run healthcare and many liberals have espoused that goal. Whether that is true or not is a matter of opinion of the intentions of the program designers and is not de facto wrong simply because they claim publicly that it is not.

The main point of the post is that most Americans have absolutely no HISTORICAL understanding of the word socialism. It's evil, and that's enough. I've spoken a couple times with apparently knowledgable, "lefty" friends of mine and even they're incapable of accurately defining it.

The issue here is not that the meaning of a word has changed over time, and that Johnson here is trying to puritanically halt some random process of semantic shift. It's that from the beginning the American public has not properly understood the word.

How can you have any hope that the state of political discourse in this country can improve when many people lack a basic understanding of terms?

Words have meaning in context. In the context of the 19th century free market, free trade, free speech advocates called themselves liberals. In the context of the 21st century high regulation, high taxation, wealth redistribution, gender, racial, and class greviance advocates call themselves liberals. There is no confusion except on the part of the author of the piece.

Lomas84 - No, a lot of people on the left did not label GW a fascist. A few people did, and they were never the kind with actual power or influence. Today, conservative pundits with multimillion followers call Obama a socialist, as have actual GOP Congressmen.

Libertarianism is a fundamentalist religion, devoid of any logically defensible foundation. Like most forms of fundamentalism, its purpose seems to be to offer adherents the satisfaction of believing that their personal preferences on any matter are somehow “superior” to those of the Stinking Masses with whom they are forced to share the planet.

In this sense, a fundamentalist Libertarian is no different from the supercilious Christian claiming superiority because his preferences “are in the Bible”.

The problem was outlined four years ago on Free Exchange and picked up on Sunstein and Thaler’s blog Nudge. The examples are dated but it may be worth repeating for a new generation of Economist readers:

Surely the expression “standard libertarian view” can only be used as an oxymoron. The great defect of this internally inconsistent philosophy is that any attempt to impose a standard is at odds with the philosophy itself.

To understand this, it is best to stand back and examine libertarianism from its roots:

If I am to be completely individualistic, then I must take complete responsibility for my own personal safety and defence. I must protect myself against the perils of the outside world, and I must be my own personal army, willing (and somehow able) to defend myself against all those other individuals who would kill me and steal my property. In practice this is observed to be not feasible.

(Anyone who wants to try is free to do so now. We will resume the argument when you return . . . . .

Having now established this fact, we may continue.)

Self-styled libertarians typically respond to this by declaring that certain limited forms of collective action are “legitimate”: typically defence, policing and sometimes other public goods such as the maintenance of sound currency. But herein lies a problem. Having accepted collective action in principle, how can one then arbitrarily limit it to certain so-called “legitimate” forms, and who decides which forms are “legitimate” and which are not.

For libertarians, collective security is a pact with the devil. Having deigned to accept the assistance of their community for security, on what basis can they then turn around and presume to dictate to their fellow citizens (the very people upon whom they have chosen to rely so absolutely) how that community is to be run? And it is an observable fact that some members of the community hold opinions which are not the least bit libertarian.

To take a topical example, was the recent intervention by the Federal Reserve in response to the sub-prime crisis (lowering the discount rate and expanding the types of collateral accepted by the Federal Reserve) a “legitimate” or an “illegitimate” intervention? Some self-styled libertarians would argue that it was clearly legitimate in order to maintain a sound banking system. Other self-styled libertarians would argue that the affected banks ought to have been allowed to go bankrupt as a necessary warning against sloppy lending practices in the future.

Would the “real” libertarians please stand up!!

One way of solving such “Where do you draw the line?” problems is to go to the extreme end of the spectrum (to adopt a boundary solution). But in the case of libertarianism, if we go to the most individualistic end of the spectrum, the concept collapses into a reductio ad absurdum. If we allow individuals complete freedom, then one aspect of “complete” freedom is the freedom to combine with other like-minded individuals to form a state. Such a state might even impose the will of those self-proclaimed “libertarians” on other individuals – perhaps to force them into understanding the blessed virtues of true libertarianism (as they see it)!

On the other hand, if we go to the other end of the spectrum . . . well . . . there is no other end of the spectrum.

So we cannot solve the “Where do you draw the line?” problem by adopting boundary solutions. All that is left of libertarianism is a set of personal opinions that vary from one self-styled libertarian to another.

There is no “standard libertarian view”.

(The philosophy can also be shown to be meaningless based on the concept of “Coasian Symmetry”.)

Of course none of this stops fundamentalist preachers from preaching. And as with all fundamentalists, whenever they are confronted with evidence or logical argument that challenges their beliefs, they simply carry on chanting their Articles of Faith until the threat goes away.

But times change even if fundamentalists do not. Just as “Christian” has gone from being a term of authority to a term of abuse within one generation (witness the rise of the fundamentalist atheists), so the catastrophe of the Global Financial Crisis has seen attitudes to “libertarian” reverse.

Your point has validity, but corporations are now making record profits and sitting on record high mountains of cash. I hope you're not suggesting that business is currently so buried in a blizzard of regulations that it cannot function the way a business should in a free economy.

There are three points. The first is that Socialism has been so weak in this country since the 1930s that most Americans don't have the faintest idea what Socialism is. The second is that the U.S has developed its own political dictionary where 'liberal' and 'conservative' are rather divorced from their origins. The third is that trying to explain any of this to the buffoons who seem to dominate media (particularly FOX) gets you labeled as an elitist.

but they have to abide by an overwhelming blizzard of regulations that nearly buries their ability to function the way a business in a free economy should function (namely, in response to the market), then by this definition it is completely fair to describe that situation as socialism.

How did Greenspan's "free markets" for banks end up?

Ahhh the good old days of Jane Curtin playing an consumer reporter against businessman Dan Aykroyd.